Literature on temporal databases typically suggests using the end time of a transaction, or the time that the transaction is committed, as the fixed value for timestamping rows associated with a transaction. In such a scheme, all modifications associated with a transaction appear to occur at the same time and the rows modified by the transaction are only visible after the transaction is committed. During the life of the transaction and before its commit, the begin time of the transaction is used as a temporary value for the time stamp. Other literature proposes using the transaction begin time as the time stamp. Either type of timestamping is challenging when the temporal database is an active data warehouse (“ADW”).